Hugo Hamilton - The Speckled People - A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

‘Polio,’ he said. ‘Is that so?’

My mother says some things are hard to talk about, some things are private.

‘You remember the stick in the water,’ she says. ‘You remember the day we were down at the sea where the dog was barking and there was a stick in the water that was crooked. You know it’s not crooked or broken. It’s an illusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s a lie.’

There is nothing in the whole world that my mother hates more than lies. She wants us to be honest and to tell the truth when you’re asked, because lies are worse than murder and nobody will trust you. You won’t even trust yourself any more. She wants no more lies, not even a small one, not even an Irish one. Irish lies or German lies, it makes no difference to her, it’s always wrong. And anyway it’s impossible to tell a lie in our house because my mother has a good nose and she can smell something burning. My father has a very good ear for music, too, and he can hear the creaks in the floorboards from miles away, even in the office in Dublin where he works with the ESB. One day I started looking in his wardrobe again. I was on my own this time and I found the picture of the sailor that he didn’t want me to see. I found the photographs of HMS Nemesis and all the medals from the British navy. When my father came home from work that evening and we all sat down at the dinner table, he knew it and had a frown on his forehead.

‘What did you do today?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Nothing,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘That’s the oldest answer in Ireland.’

He knew every answer in Ireland because he was a schoolteacher once. I could see myself twice in his glasses, but I couldn’t see if his eyes were soft or hard. He was waiting for me to talk, so I told him that when I grow up I want to be a sailor. I told him I want to have a uniform and go all over the world on ships.

‘Have you been looking in my wardrobe?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

I knew that nobody would ever trust me again because I said a lie. My father asked me the same question once more. He said I was the champion of wrong answers and he told me to think hard because he wanted the right one this time.

‘Never be afraid of the truth,’ my mother said.

I thought she was able to smell burning. And my father was watching the way I was buttering a slice of bread with hard butter, tearing big holes and making a mess of it.

‘No, I didn’t,’ I said again.

‘We have to believe him,’ my mother then said, but after dinner when everything was cleared away from the table, I had to stay behind with my father looking at me. He can hear what’s inside your head. He waited for a while and then asked me if there were any questions I wanted to ask him.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Then why were you looking in my wardrobe?’

I wasn’t sure which questions would make him angry and which questions would make him smile. He sat facing me for a long time until he had to get up and go outside into the garden because it was starting to get windy. He told me to sit there and think. I could hear him in the greenhouse rattling with sticks and I thought it was for me again and that we would be going up to pray for Ireland. I heard the back door banging in anger. But then I heard him outside in the garden with the sticks, tying down the new trees. I could hear the wind blowing. I could hear my mother talking to him and it was dark by the time he sat down at the table again. Then he looked at me and just smiled. He wasn’t angry any more. He said it was wrong to tell lies and it was wrong to be more interested in the past than in the future. It was no use looking back all the time and he would show me something else instead.

‘I’m going to show you the future,’ he said.

I waited for him to say what it was but he just smiled.

‘It won’t be long, wait till you see. We’ll be going there soon.’

That night there was a big storm. The window was rattling and the rain was tapping on the glass. Sometimes the wind pushed so hard that even all the rattling stopped and I thought the glass would break. I could see the shadow of the trees on the wall, shaking so much that they sometimes disappeared altogether. It was so wild and angry outside that I thought the roof would lift off the house. I thought the front door would blow in and everybody would be able to walk inside and see us. I heard my father coming up the stairs with one hard foot and one soft. My mother came to say goodnight and told me to pray for all the people out on the sea, and then I thought the house was moving like a ship.

I know that when my father was small he was called Jack after his own father John. He didn’t know anything about his father until his mother told him he was a sailor with soft eyes. The sailor had a soft voice, too, she said, and he always called her ‘baby’ because she was the youngest in her family. He was away at sea all the time, even at Christmas, and the only thing that my father could remember seeing was the sailor’s uniform, laid out all ready one night on the kitchen table. The next morning he was gone again and there was nothing left only the picture over the mantelpiece and all the letters he wrote home that were kept in a tin with roses on the lid.

Every time there was a storm she stayed up all night praying for all the people out at sea. And then she knew everything was all right when she got a postcard from Gibraltar with a short message.

Dear Mary Frances,

Rough crossing. More homesick than seasick,

all my love, John.

It was the last card he sent. He must have put it in the mailbox before he went out to work on deck. A wave must have come from the side and caused the ship to lurch, they said, because he fell over the railing down on to the lower deck. He would have fallen overboard and drowned if not for his friends pulling him to safety and bringing him inside to lie down on his bunk to sleep for a while. But when he woke up, he could not remember anything. He didn’t look ill or have any broken bones and there was nothing wrong at all until he walked off the ship in Gibraltar and got lost. He was like the Munster poets and kept going around and around the town in circles with no idea where to go, until the captain realised that he was missing and sent a search party out to arrest him for being a deserter.

The first thing that Mary Frances heard was some weeks later when she got a letter from Manchester saying that her husband was in hospital there. He had fallen and lost his memory on HMS Vivid , they said. She wasn’t able to go and see him so she asked a cousin who was a nun in Liverpool to go to see him instead. And after a long time he was allowed to come home to Leap. He never wore the sailor’s uniform again and he would never be seasick again because he was invalided out of the navy. There was no money coming from the British navy either to anyone who was invalided and he couldn’t work at anything else in Leap. So Mary Frances looked after him and went up to Mass with him every morning to try to bring his memory back. He remembered her face and her name, but then after a while he started forgetting even that much, so that he could do nothing at times, only hold his head in his hands and say that he wanted to go home. He was a stranger in his own home. And then he lost his mind altogether one day, because he took a knife in his hand. My father was still a small child and he was crying so much that the noise went into the sailor’s head like a nail into the wall, so he stood up and said he would kill him if he didn’t stay quiet. Everybody in west Cork knew it wasn’t like John Hamilton to do a thing like that, but his head wasn’t right after falling on a British ship. He stood in front of his own picture in uniform, holding a kitchen knife in his hand and shouting, until Mary Frances had to stand in front of him, in front of the man she loved more than anyone else in the world and tell him to kill her first.